


we're good at bad ideas, my love

by childhoodinfamy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-16
Updated: 2014-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-21 10:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2465111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childhoodinfamy/pseuds/childhoodinfamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I know it's gotta stop, love, but I don't know how.</p><p>Or, Bucky can't remember a time when he wasn't in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're good at bad ideas, my love

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwVITuuoqQk).
> 
> Sarah [hippoghouliage](hippoghouliage.tumblr.com) and I picked this song and she [drew this amazing thing](http://sarandco.tumblr.com/post/100104766411/were-wise-beyond-our-years-but-were-good-at-bad) and I wrote this crap.

Steve’s voice drops before Bucky’s. He’s just barely twelve when it starts; Bucky’s a year older and still waiting.  Bucky thinks Steve is secretly glad he’s beaten Bucky to something, but he just blushes every time his voice cracks, powering through the falter and daring Bucky to say something.

When this happens, Bucky finds himself staring at Steve’s lips instead of his words and concentrating on the way his voice dips so much lower than it used to. Even when his own voice starts to follow, it never lives up. Steve’s voice is like a child finger-painting gently against the walls of his stomach, the cool feeling hitting him all at once and then sliding further until it’s all Bucky can do to keep breathing normally.

He tells himself it’s jealousy.

 

 

They grow up next to each other; he’s got Steve’s life memorized the same way he knows his own, possibly better.

What he remembers best, though, is seeing Steve in the stands at the baseball diamond, cheering louder than anyone else there, his shouts carrying all the way to Bucky’s ears. He grins, lopsided and sloppy, when he hears it.

 

 

There is no logic to Steve. His body is small, but he’s picked more fights than anyone else Bucky knows, including himself. He has no muscles to speak of, but he helps the elderly with their groceries. His voice, conversely, is deep and strong, but he uses it mostly to _excuse me, ma’am_  and _Bucky, you can’t say that_ (except when he’s getting passionate about something, and then his voice makes him sound like a grown man, and Bucky’s rolling his eyes and slinging an arm around Steve’s shoulders, but it’s enough to kill Bucky, that voice). He’s sick so frequently it feels nearly endless, but if he’s lucid, he’s fighting. It’s just not always in the way other people are.

Bucky realizes this as he watches Steve battle his own goddamn lungs. He’s at war from the inside out, and he’s resolutely determined to win.

There’s no logic to Steve, but that boy is the beginning and the end of Bucky’s world.

When he’s sixteen and starting to understand himself, Bucky starts feeling the weight of that fact, and he thinks he might know now what it feels like to be fighting against something that’s happening inside of you.

 

 

Bucky meets girls, he takes them out.  He actually likes a fair number of them, the way their soft limbs swing when he takes them dancing; he loves the way some of them take off their heels at the end of the night, how they let him hold their hand as he walks them home.

He sets Steve up on dates, too.

Bucky hates hearing Steve say their names, resents anything that isn’t directed towards him, even if he was the one to drag them out. If it had been up to Steve, they’d have stayed in, and Bucky would have read aloud from one of his books while Steve sketched Bucky’s feet, his hands, his lips, his anything.

Sometimes Bucky gets good and drunk once Steve’s gone home, just so he can stop thinking about it.

He always kisses his date good night. It feels like sand in his veins at worst, like nothing at best.

 

 

Bucky thinks it’ll get better when he goes to war. At least then, he won’t be able to hear Steve’s voice, he’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder to imagine anything past his face.

It’s not any easier.

Steve writes to him so damn much, and every time he sees _Rogers_ and their tiny shared apartment’s address written in the top left corner, it’s like a million minuscule needles shooting through his body, in the best possible way. The other boys asked at first if it was from a sweetheart back home. “A friend,” he’d said, and they pretended not to notice the way Bucky’s mouth curved around the syllable.

He only reads the letters after dark, huddled close to a candle, because he can’t keep a poker face when it comes to Steve. Steve’s voice rings through every sentence, every word, every goddamn letter on the page. He can just imagine him dropping the _g_ at the end of words, the way Steve had a million ways of saying Bucky’s name.

In the end, Bucky can’t help but think of him.

He thinks of Steve quitting his art classes the second Bucky’s not there to convince him they’re worth the time. Steve, bent over his sketchbook anyway, late into the night. Steve, maybe drawing Bucky. Steve, thinking about Bucky, at night after he’s taken off his suspenders and his trousers, left in his stocking feet, back hunched and concentrating on capturing Bucky’s features, and Bucky is close enough to touch him if he’d just finish the drawing already and let him move—

Steve, trying to enlist in the army. 4F. Steve, trying to enlist again—and again—and again—Steve succeeding, by sheer force of will. Steve, shipped off to war.

Steve, lips on Bucky’s skin—

Steve, gun in hand, force of will not enough anymore, not in the middle of a real war—

Steve, saying Bucky’s name like a goddamn prayer as he—

Steve, bleeding—

Bucky’s not sure what’s worse, the worrying or the lusting.

 

 

“ _Bucky,”_ he hears. He thinks he’s imagining it, he’s pretended so many times now. His own name wakes him up from that table, and _oh. What a sight to wake up to._

 

 

It’s not until days after Steve’s rescued them, after they’ve trekked back to camp and have settled as much as one ever can as a soldier in a war, that Bucky realizes he has a real problem now.

 

 

It was one thing when he was a kid and didn’t know what was happening. It was another when he knew exactly what he was feeling, exactly what he was thinking as he touched himself in the quiet of his bunk, with Steve was thousands of miles away.

It’s an entirely different beast to consider now that he _knows_ and Steve is only a room away.

It’s an entirely different beast now that the other men know _Rogers_ isn’t a woman, isn’t some dame back home.

 

 

Not long ago, the American troops had saved some men from a concentration camp. Before being sent there, they had been in serving prison sentences for homosexuality.

The Allied forces delivered them from the concentration camp back to prison.

 

 

Bucky reminds himself, late at night as he lifts his hips and bites his knuckles to keep quiet, that it’s still illegal, even if the man is Captain America. ( _Steve Rogers_ , Bucky keeps saying, over and over in his head, because the title never really seemed to fit Steve. Too self-important.)

Bucky is no public figure. There are no special allowances for him.

 

 

He tries not to avoid Steve, but he’s scared of what his face is going to betray. He’s more scared of that than anything on the other side of his rifle.

 

 

Sometimes, Bucky thinks—

But sometimes, _sometimes,_ he catches a glimpse of the way Steve looks at him, too.

 

 

When they talk, sometimes, Bucky gets distracted again. He lets his guard down.

“You’re keeping the outfit, right?”

Heart beating out his chest, oh _God_ , _please let Steve overlook the way that sounded_ , but the look on his face, maybe he noticed, maybe he doesn’t care, maybe he—

 

 

It’s far past dark and Bucky is rereading Steve’s letters again—worn to almost cloth-like softness, not a single damn one saying anything about him enlisting or letting a group of scientists inject him with some fucking serum, not one goddamn _word_ —and he’s suddenly angry.

Before Bucky can second guess himself, he’s up and knocking on Steve’s door. He feels his pulse picking up, his body heating, and he gets ready to yell when—

The door is open, and Steve is big now, Bucky has too look up to meet his eyes, but _God_ that look is the same, and Bucky wants that look to be _something, God, anything._

“ _Bucky._ ”

And the word breaks him. He’s heard it a thousand times before the war and during, but there’s something about the way Steve says it now, the way his voice cracks on the _u_ like it used to when it had first started dropping.

“Hey,” Bucky responds.

He steps into the room.

“ _Hey,_ ” he repeats. He closes the door.

 

 

And it’s like a question, the way Steve kisses him then.

The way Bucky kisses back leaves a lot less room for interpretation.

 

 

Steve’s hands are resting lightly on Bucky’s hips, and he stills his lips against Bucky’s. “Should I stop?”

Bucky answers by twisting his fingers in Steve’s tie, tugging blindly until it comes loose in his hands.

“Buck, should I—”

“Don’t you fucking _dare_.”

“Thank God.” He whispers it against the skin of Bucky’s neck, desperate, hands chasing up his sides.

When they finally tip backwards, Steve’s blankets are so neat underneath Bucky; he digs his feet, makes sure to twist his toes tight; he wants things messy. He holds on to Steve, his fingers digging valleys into the skin of his arms, his back, his everywhere.

Every time Steve touches Bucky, it’s like he’s asking permission. Bucky’s far more reckless about things.

He’s fumbling at the buttons of Steve’s shirt, frantic and sloppy and practically useless. Steve is lifting Bucky from the bed by the hips, tugging his shirt from his pants. He places his hand against the side of Bucky’s neck, softly, as Bucky finishes off the buttons. Once the last one has slipped free, Bucky is frantic, pushing the fabric from Steve’s shoulders.

Their mouths slide together, smoother than Bucky ever imagined it, in all the years he’s been picturing Steve’s lips against his own.

Once he’s gotten Steve’s suspenders off—“God, why are you fully dressed in your own room?”—he starts to lose track. Their shirts are off, his fingers wrap around Steve’s belt, they kick their pants over sockless feet, mouths still latched to each other and knees knocking as they try to arrange themselves until finally they succeed.

The sound of the last pieces of clothing hitting the floor is the best damn secret Bucky has ever known.

Their breaths shudder together as Steve lowers himself onto Bucky, warm skin to warm skin, lips pressed together but unmoving, trying to gasp a breath.

Steve makes a small, desperate noise in the back of his throat, and Bucky is surging up; he grabs Steve and pulls his hips down between his legs, makes his intent painfully clear. Steve pulls back for an instant. “Bucky?”

Bucky meets his eyes, challenging, and wraps his legs around Steve’s waist. “Steve.”

And it’s not a goddamn question, the way Steve kisses him then, the way they move together.

 

 

After, when Bucky wraps himself around Steve, Steve laying back against Bucky’s chest and tracing patterns in the hair that grows on Bucky’s arms, they breathe in unison. Bucky rests his chin on Steve’s shoulder, presses open-mouthed kisses to the skin of his neck. Loves the way Steve’s eyelids shudder closed every time.

 

 

He can barely move when he wakes up, but he doesn’t forget for a single second why. His hand immediately shoots to his side, expecting a cool bed, finding the skin of Steve’s abdomen instead.

He leans over, kisses Steve’s sleeping eyelids until they open; he looks confused, but it quickly transitions to joy, and then—“Bucky,” he says, eyes sad, and his voice cracks again; he is young, he is Steve Rogers and Bucky has loved him since they were kids, and that voice can never hide any secrets.

 

 

This is a war. The good guys are saving men from the Nazis only to bring them back to jail for loving other men, but today. Today, Bucky lays with Steve, and it’s not a question. It’s not a crime.


End file.
